NEW YORK -- Jennifer Ehle isn't yet a household name, so here's a quick primer to get started. The first thing to know is that the 33-year-old actress has real chops. Two years ago, she took home the Tony for best performance by a leading actress in David Leveaux's staging of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, which ran on Broadway and London's West End.
The second thing to know is that she comes from excellent stock. Ehle is the daughter of the American novelist John Ehle (Trail of Tears, Last One Home) and Rosemary Harris, a great doyenne of the British stage. Ehle carries herself with the appropriate cosmopolitan grace. She speaks like Grace Kelly, with a refined accent that sounds classic even if you can't quite place where it comes from. In New York recently, promoting Neil LaBute's newest film, Possession, Ehle answered the door to her hotel suite in a black, Prada-esque suit.
The third thing to know is that she has a puppy, a squirmy, blond mutt with a tail like a question mark. He races around the room until Ehle wrestles him into submission on the couch. Grace Kelly hauteur is out the window and Ehle looks delighted. Her clothes are generously sprinkled with dog hair, and she doesn't mind a bit.
In Possession, an adaptation of A. S. Byatt's Booker-winning novel, Ehle plays Christabel LaMotte, a writer and the lover of a fictional Victorian poet named Randolph Henry Ash, played by Jeremy Northam. The film balances LaMotte and Ash's love story with the adventures of two present-day academics, played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, who, after discovering a cache of Ash's letters, become literary sleuths, obsessed with tracking down the details of the Victorians' affair.
LaBute knew he wanted Ehle for the role, but Ehle played hard to get. "I approached Jennifer for the part of Christabel," LaBute says. "At the time, she was doing a play and wasn't interested. Then, of course, two days after the run ended, . . . she says, 'Yes, this looks really great, I'd like to be involved' "
For LaBute, who is best known for emotionally scathing dramas, most notably his debut film, In the Company of Men, Possession was his first experiment with a historical setting. It presented new challenges. "On-stage, you can suggest a period setting with motifs," he notes. "On film, it becomes a matter of details. But it's more than making sure the language is right and that there aren't any airplanes in the background. Most of all, you have to nail the mores to make it feel right."
Ehle is one of those actors, like her co-star Jeremy Northam, who turns up in period pieces in large part because they have a knack for making it feel right. "She's simply one of the most talented screen and stage actresses out there," LaBute went on. "And she just has one of those amazing faces -- strong, but also with a kind of serenity."
Ehle has cheekbones off the cover of a romance novel, and she can move with such economy that even corsets don't seem constrictive. "Period roles are what I tend to get," she says with a laugh. "But if I can make a career out of playing women who are sharp as well as emotionally complex, no matter what era, I'd hardly complain."
Possession is Ehle's highest-profile film work to date, but she seems in no hurry to make a play for the limelight. She's taken the last year off, and she thinks she might take another year before taking on anything new. "I've been so fortunate with the choices I've made, but really I'm not interested in being famous," she says. "I'm very happy keeping my life private. When something turns out to be a hit, I tend to run the other way."
For someone so plausibly a member of the English gentry, it's a bit surprising to learn that Ehle has decidedly down-home American roots. She was born in North Carolina, and her family is still in the area. Her parents, she announces proudly, were married on the front porch. Last year, Ehle married the American writer Michael Ryan, and they've made North Carolina their home base as well.
She has, however, also spent half of her life in the United Kingdom, so it's no wonder her accent can get a little slippery. "I lose track," she acknowledges, "so I've gotten to a point where I don't try to keep it all straight any more." She left home in her teens to train at the elite Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and found much of her early success in Britain.
After her breakthrough performance in a steamy BBC production, The Camomile Lawn, she later won a BAFTA award for her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet -- opposite Colin Firth's Darcy -- in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice. In Istvan Szabo's epic Sunshine, she played the young wife of a well-to-do Austro-Hungarian Jew whose life is rocked by historical events. And then in 2000 she had her acclaimed run in The Real Thing.
Asked about her background, Ehle begins, "Well, my mother is an actress" -- which is a bit like Leila Ali saying, "My dad used to box." Rosemary Harris is an eight-time Tony nominee, and a winner for her work in the 1966 production of James Goldman's The Lion in Winter. Over a 50-year career, she has performed everything from Shakespeare to Beckett to Tennessee Williams -- and most recently made a brief screen appearance in the summer blockbuster Spider-Man as Peter Parker's aunt.
Ehle and her mother have worked together on a number of occasions, including in The Camomile Lawn and later in Sunshine, where the two women actually play the same character at different ages. There seems to be no trace of rivalry between them.
"I guess it seems to some people that there must be tension," Ehle says, "but I've never felt that way. When I was 15 or so, I got very excited about acting and pursued it with a passion. My parents have always been very supportive."
As if to illustrate the point, the hotel-room phone rings. The puppy leaps off the couch. Ehle answers, "Oh, hi, ma! Yes, I'm doing fine!"
Mother and daughter went head-to-head at the Tony Awards in 2000, with Ehle nominated for The Real Thing, and Harris for Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings. Ehle took home the prize. "I was happy to win," Ehle says, "but those prizes always seemed an odd sort of competition. It's like a race where one of the competitors is running, one is swimming and another crawling. I've always felt the prize really belongs to the role, so ultimately then to the playwright or the director."
Ehle has seen success on both stage and screen, and she wants to continue to work in both settings. "I feel that whichever one I'm doing, I miss the other," she says. "There's a freedom in being in front of the camera. On the stage I'm aware of the audience and the need to project whatever emotion for the whole room. I feel with a camera, even if it's more intimate in a way, almost as if no one is watching. But I think that's also a credit to the directors I've worked with.
"With film," she continues, "you play for the moment, and because you're so often shooting out of sequence, it's hard to feel the continuity of your character's experience. Whereas on-stage, there are those nights when it's just magic, there's that momentum. And that's amazing."